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Big plants that faced freezing temperatures now have home at UGA

Maureen O'Brien, horticulturalist for the University of Georgia, tends to plants adopted from Alps Road Elementary School at the University of Georgia College of Environment and Design in Athens, Ga., Friday, Jan. 4, 2013. (AJ Reynolds/Staff)

Maureen O'Brien, horticulturalist for the University of Georgia, tends to plants adopted from Alps Road Elementary School at the University of Georgia College of Environment and Design in Athens, Ga., Friday, Jan. 4, 2013. (AJ Reynolds/Staff)

Some unusual Athens plants will have a warm place to sleep this winter after all.

The big container plants, some 40 years old, faced an uncertain future in December. Most of the plants couldn’t stay at Alps Road Elementary School any longer, Principal Angela Lumpkin-Barnett had decided. A staff member had slipped on overflowing water, and even though the hall that had been the plants’ winter home was wide, they were a navigation hazard during class changes.

Chip Herndon, the man who owned the plants, feared they would die as temperatures dropped, and put out a call for someone to adopt them. He couldn’t take the more than two dozen plants home because they had grown much too big to fit into the normal-sized rooms in his home.

Herndon had brought the plants to the school about nine years ago, when his daughter was in the second grade. Several were plants he had rescued after they’d been discarded years ago. He had watered, fed and tended them since.

But new owners showed up after an article about the plants’ plight appeared in the Athens Banner-Herald as the weather turned chilly in December — mainly the University of Georgia’s College of Environment and Design, where many of the bigger plants are now strategically placed in halls and corners.

The College of Environment and Design got the majority of the plants, but other individuals or agencies got most of the rest, Herndon said.

Just before Christmas, a truck and crew from UGA’s facilities management division showed up to move plants from the school into the environment and design college’s new building on Jackson Street.

They were able to get the plants inside just before the cold got dangerous for them, said Maureen O’Brien, the college’s horticulturalist.

The plants will be both interior decoration and teaching tools, she said. Students in the college learn about using plants inside buildings as well as outside, she explained.

Also, the college’s new building needed the warmth the plants bring to its halls.

“They really soften this new building to us,” she said.

Faculty member David Nichols saw the newspaper article and jumped at the chance to bring the impressive plants to the UGA campus, she said. One bird of paradise plant is 15 feet tall.

Plants like the huge specimens Herndon has lovingly tended for decades can cost thousands of dollars, O’Brien said.

O’Brien said she’d take care of the plants as Herndon had.

“I know he put a lot of love and energy into them, and I’m going to do the same thing,” she said.